The Enduring Significance of Atlantic Slavery
In the United States, 2019 became emblematic for Black history. That year marked the four hundredth anniversary of 1619, the arrival of the first documented enslaved Africans in the colony of Virginia.4 The year 1619 has been associated with the birth of slavery in the United States, yet this date is also a construction.
Indeed, as we will see in this book, since the sixteenth century, thousands of enslaved Africans had been brought to the Americas, not only to the West Indies, Brazil, and other regions of Latin America but also to the region encompassing today’s United States. Nonetheless, the year 1619 became a landmark, a commemorative date that gained new visibility through a journalistic project of the same name led by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times, featuring essays by scholars, writers, and artists focusing on the present-day legacies of slavery in the United States.5The emphasis on this specific year and the politicized reactions against the journalistic project triggered fierce public discussions in the media. Some academics questioned the project’s accuracy, whereas politicians criticized it for making slavery central to the history of the United States.6 But regardless of how political parties and individuals reacted, and despite the fact that 1619 did not mark the start of Africans being taken to the Americas, the year that for decades had already been a site of memory for many African Americans gained new meaning and began to be conceived as a reminder of how chattel slavery gave birth to anti-Black racism in a country that had failed to implement any national date of recognition to commemorate its tragic involvement in this human atrocity.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world and following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, antiracist protests against police violence spread in the United States and in several countries in Europe and Latin America. Eventually, in June 2021, after many years of discussion, Juneteenth National Independence Day was officially instated as a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation from slavery in the United States.
The holiday is certainly an important achievement and a major step toward honoring formerly enslaved people and their descendants. But battles over the past have continued to evolve. Starting in 2020, several states in the United States introduced legislation banning books on the history of slavery and racism. These prohibitions are not related to the history of slavery itself; they are attempts to control how the history of slavery is taught, and they are expressions of how the past is politicized in the present, as I have discussed in previous works.7